


Artificial Growth: Retrograde

by RantCasey



Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Horror, Cyberpunk, Gen, post-cyberpunk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 14:36:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18122285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RantCasey/pseuds/RantCasey
Summary: A P.I. investigates organ harvesting in a city where the STD infected mutate, the population is enraptured by advertisements beamed directly into their brains, and the news, it doesn't make sense anymore.The future we've all been promised fell apart. This is the aftermath.One man holds his place in a changing world.





	1. Chapter 1

Three pale, soft arms stuck out from under a wet blanket in the alleyway. 

The homeless man caught Mordeth's eye. "She's a keeper." 

From beneath the blanket, the slightly sweet rot of a body decomposing. 

It'd started with the bums. White vans, a rarity after the vehicle prohibitions, pulled up and offered medical care, food and shelter. Those dumb enough would climb in and never be seen again. 

Something in the dumpster behind the bumb banged. The bum looked at it with an expression of worry, not surprise. Maybe another girlfriend. 

"You come on over if you're down with disease." The bum winked, and then let lose a hacking, wet cough. Even in the low light, the blood on his dirty hand was visible. 

"When did the last van leave?" 

"Came bout an hour ago," said the bum when he'd recovered. The crinkling sounds of something getting comfortable came from the dumpster. 

"Any takers?" Mordeth looked at his watch. He'd tuned it this morning. Now, after roughly twelve hours, the date portion was scrolling downward into the future. The time read 3:37. Looking at the watch was more a habit than a productive activity. 

"Got a couple a frequency jammers, younger too." 

If the bum didn't let people go voluntarily, soon they'd be snatching people like him by force. 

The gutters were overflowing into the street again. Mordeth slid the bum a dollar and walked out of the alley. 

A sick, stale air hung in the waiting room of the hospital. Florescent bulbs flickered through nicotine stained plastic covers. A security guard dozed in the corner, outfitting with government blacks. The woman at the desk was dressed in something a secretary should wear, but it was shabby. Worn. She dragged on a cigarette. 

Rumor had it that the only ones that got out of the hospital were the ones who were already in that space between dying and dead. First the gunshot wounds had gone missing. Then it started to be the ill but curable. X1 had gotten the idea that the hospital wasn't a place you should visit. 

The bum had managed to give a last name. He had flicked the stolen wallet between dirty fingers. 

"My grandson came through here an hour and twenty ago, his name is Keibler Scott." Mordeth raised his eye brows in mock worry and concern. "He would've arrived in one of those vans, the white ones that help people." 

He gestured out to the parking lot so she could see his hand. He'd made himself look small. 

"I'll see if we have anyone by that name on file." The woman looked through an admissions document that was dated incorrectly. 

"I just want to see my grandson." 

No one knew the date anymore. 

On the news, playing on a televison still old enough to be flat and wall mounted, the anchor gripped a pencil in his fist and slammed the tip flat against the desk. Deeper into the ER, a man groaned. There was the hiss of oxegen. 

"We have no one here by that name." The womab stubbed out her cigarette on an ashtray with the hospital's logo engraved on it. 

Outside, a patch of grass in front had flattened and yellowed in the shape of a human body. It had taken a while to remove it. 

Mordeth lit up. 

"It's 6:00 am here in City X and we've got some continuing rain--" The anchor had recovered from his outburst and was flashing a large, white smile. The supposedly live feed behind him showed the same sunset they'd been using for six months. It was probably ten in the morning. 

Mordeth sat on his couch, hunched over papers that were spread on his coffee table. The new client had paid in advance but had no information go on. The meeting was through a paid agent. Impersonal. It didn't smell like a honey pot. If the money hadn't been right he wouldn't have quieted his suspicions. No one cared about him anymore, anyway. 

Private Organ Harvesting. Targets: Healthy young women. Nonvirginal. 

He glanced toward his roommate's door. The alarm inside beeped, muffled, underneath something. 

\--  
The smell shouldn't have hung on. The cases had the stink of the sewer on them. The warehouse seemed to exist outside of time without people and boxes moving within it. 

Four people stood bathed in the red light of an exit sign. A table with an old, cracked, banker's lamp was before them. Mordeth and his own approached. 

Jonsey stood with his arms braced against the table. His teeth shone, even through time. It'd been another life. 

"You're early," Mordeth motioned for his men to stand to the other side. 

"It's my spot." Jonsey almost looked like he was going to force a chuckle and instead pushed himself off the table. A wood tipped cigar was clenched between his teeth and he dragged it. 

Mordeth motioned for his to put the cases on the table. 

"Hear about what happened out in X1?" 

"What, you loosin' your cool over it, slick?" A case with the payment was opened by one of Jonseys. The ember on the tip of the cigar glowed. 

"I'm on my way out." He'd been indicating that with more and more finality. Mordeth's hired hand opened the case. Jonsey glanced at the guns. They'd done this before. 

"Who gives a shit about out West. Place is a certified shit-hole." The hand holding the wood tipped cigar waved it off. 

"Not different enough. I'll be in touch." Mordeth nodded. 

The game had started to become unsustainable even before then. Mordeth's supplier hadn't stopped providing, the bonds they'd made in the block wars ensured it. Still, buyers had been getting harder to nail down, buyers that made the cut, ones that didn't offend whatever morality Mordeth could scrape together. 

Jonsey made his living moving aroubd trafficked women and drugs. The guns Mordeth sold him wouldn't be used to start seiges on innocents, wouldn't provoke violence in the streets. Jonsey ran his operation with enough sense that Mordeth wouldn't be sniffed out and murdered. 

There were rumors about who Jonsey was in his personal life. The dark glint of insanity in his eye proved it. As an enterprise, though, he was safe enough to do business with. 

Mordeth and Jonsey's meetings started to have notes of thinly veiled desperation once other arms traffickers and the leaders of smaller criminal outfits started to appear in dumpsters around East X. 

The compartment where Mordeth stored his money, beneath the broken refridgerator in a dingy apartment, was almost full by the time that his supplier, Axl, turned up decapitated, casterated, and sodomized on the sidewalk in front if a bodega. It wasn't long before Smith, the one he dealt with directly, was getting torn apart by dogs that had happened to come across his dumped body. 

Mordeth had waited. He called his sister. He moved the fridge, put the money in a backpack, and put the backpack in the ceiling. In the end, he put it back under the fridge. He started to sleep in a chair with the gun in his lap. Most nights, he still did. 

The door swings open to a place with women. A magnitized card is swiped across a stripper's bare breast to pick up on the chip that has been cheekily inserted there. Mordeth blinks in the low light. The face of his watch is a deep red, and starts to bleed onto his wrist. The carpet on the floor is spongey and thick. 

The bartender notices him and slides a drink forward. It's on a napkin. 

His beeper displays Jonsey's name and a callback number. 

The news is playing, the anchor is slamming his face onto the desk. His eyes have filled with blood, his nose is broken, his front teeth are stained orange. The news cuts to a woman in birthing pains in a hospital. When the baby is delivered in sharp relief, it's gray and isn't moving. 

"You seein' this?" Mordeth sips his drink. 

The bartender has turned away, busy. 

Onscreen, doctors are cramming the stillbirth back into the vagina, they are squeezing the head to fit, the baby's eyes bulge outward. It cuts to the mother's face, and she's smiling through her tears. She begins to laugh. A doctor is whistling. 

Mordeth gets up and steps away from the bar. 

On stage, the stippers thighs are slick with red black blood. The man with the car leans forward, slides a finger through it, and producing something ropey, pinches it between his thumb and forefinger and puts it into his mouth. 

The bartender gurgles. There's the metallic sound of something playing across his teeth followed by a crunch, and a moan. 

Mordeth starts to the door. 

It inches open. A face inches in through the crack with agonizing slowness. The man's smile widens. The whites of his eyes are visible over the top of his iris and the grin looks painful. 

Behind him, the bartender makes a wet slapping noise. 

The man coming through the door is Jonsey and the head at his feet, bleeding into the carpet, is the elated and grinning face of a young boy. 

Mordeth opened his eyes. 

He'd pissed himself. 

It'd been happening. He got off the couch and went to the bathroom. 

When Mordeth left his apartment, it was drizzling and dark. The roommate still hadn't come home. He passed the glassy eyes of a frequency jammed woman fixed toward the dark and cloudy sky. Most of the population enjoyed money at the expense of their experience. The government outfitted you with the ability to get paid watching and listening to advertistments and public service announcements directly in your hearing and vision. It'd been happening for decades, now. 

It wasn't uncommon to see people stuck in ad land for longer and longer times. The frequency had gotten stronger lately. The new frequency wasn't covered on the news, it wasn't released officially. The more heavily subsized tended to gather items and a place to live, enjoying the snippets of an actual life before the advertising came back. Efforts at blocking the advertisements while still enjoying the money usually left the scammer a little slower and demented. They'd die in accidents or of starvation and thirst. 

The rings on his fingers had multiplied over the years. So hadn't his chins. Eugene dragged a napkin over his face. The drinks in front of them both dripped condensation. 

"Why are you even bothering with that horseshit, Mordeth? You're gonna be chasin' your own tail out there." Eugene gestured toward the windows. "These people, fuck em. You see how they are." Eugene did his best impression of someone who had become more advertisement than human. 

"They paid up front. Hear anything about Jonsey lately?" 

"Whaddya want that fucking kiddie diddler for?" 

They hadn't discussed what their old business partner had actually done with his free time. The bluntess was mildly surprising. 

"He's got pull." 

Eugene grunted and picked up his drink. He swilled it around his mouth before swallowing. 

"He's sittin' at some table in East X. Same as me." 

"Could be up north." Mordeth picked up his drink. The tremor in his hand made the surface of the liquor ripple. 

Eugene raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips slightly. 

"He's not up north. Listen up, you gotta find a fucking protoge or something." 

"Some of us can't stare at a wall and wait for news of our conquests all day." 

Eugene waved it off. 

"Go see the Patels. They own the Center City chain. They had a young girl get caught up in the shit and go missing. Might be some bullshit where she's caught down in the slums, who knows. Someone like that goes missing, people talk, and no one's sayin' she's out there growing eyes in her mouth." 

\-- 

"Reporting to you live, it's City X News. We've got chief of police Richard Connolly here with an update on the fight against Satanism. Richard, the police have uncovered and detained a massive circle, can you go ahead and tell us about that?"

The so called Chief of Police had the nowhere eyes and plastered on smile of a news puppet. The one they'd used in previous years had more of a look to him. When they played anything about the city on the news, it was this story of Satanic cults. The idea in the beginning, Mordeth thought, was to keep people inside and afraid. No one had believed it in fifteen years or more. In the beginning, they'd stage events and hire people to create sacrifice circles, and teeangers followed, but then everyone grew used to it or grew up. 

The bottom ticker on the screen had been binary code for the last three days. Before then, snow cancellations for a place outside City X. 

Sometimes the reporters and anchors would malfunction. Whatever private frequency they were on would hiccup and they would stiffen or start talking nonsense. He'd been around to witness a few have strokes live on air, when the news was still live and the control frequencies a little newer. 

No one had seen her growing eyes in her mouth. The STD infection that was mutating people over time was becoming widespread. He'd recently seen a woman in a scarf that had caught his eye and wiggled a finger out from behind its folds. Mordeth hit the streets often enough that he'd see the same bum get more and more bundled up until they disappeared forever. Gone into hiding, maybe suicide. With some, it happened quicker than others. If they kept the deformities too exposed, they might be picked up. There was some question of a light sensitivity aspect aside from the deformity. He hadn't talked to one of them long enough to ask.


	2. Chapter 2

Mordeth is on the couch. There is the sound of metal scraping over pavement coming from every direction. The same clatter over a level and uneven surface. 

On the news, a manhole cover is moved, and the barrell of a gun peaks out. It points directly to the camera and fires. 

The night achor is staring fixed at the screen. A woman applies make up over the sceen of sweat on his frozen face. Bristles of the dust covered brush dip through the gap in his slightly parted teeth. The woman applying the make up is humming. 

Mordeth grabs the gun off his lap and stands. The apartment is cast in red light. Now, it looks even more dilapidated than it normally does. Something is weeping from beneath the cracks in the walls. The drywall is yellowed with water damage and has fallen away in places. He looks behind him at his couch to see that it's mouldering, stinking, turning brown, sagging beneath its own weight. 

The television set sputters and dies. The metal noise gives way to the noise of someone digging before returning to the sound of scraping against pavement. 

There's fear. 

The carpet in the hallway has rotted away. Flies buzz over the body liquifying through sour clothes. Water drops. 

He aims his gun and knows that the thing making the noise is in the apartment at the end of the hallway. 

Liquid begins to pour through the crack under the door. First it's clear, then brown. 

Long and wet tendrils come through holes that have appeared in the door, a bony claw at the end of each of them. They're slick to the touch, a dark purple gray. The sound of the flies buzzing over the body has risen to counter the sounds whatever's in the door is making. 

A tendril wraps itself around Mordeth's ankle as more emerge and move toward him, writhing through the air. He aims to shoot his gun through it, and the gun doesn't fire. He looks down at his arm, and there are leaches, he feels them on his chest, he drops the gun, the tendrils have him now

\-- 

The roommate's door was open again. The alarm was still beeping. 

Mordeth walked into the bathroom. The light was on. All over the sink were tufts of blond hair. He picked up a tuft and dropped it into the toilet. On the floor there was something small, yellowed and new. He stooped to pick it up. 

A molar. Bloodied, on the bottom. 

He dropped it into the toilet. Beside the toilet plunger, another molar. He picked it up, and plunk, it joined its brother. 

Devon had been his roommate for a few months. He liked to keep someone seedy around in case someone tracked him back, or decided to roll over on him. There was plausible deniability that the money wasn't his, that the guns, they weren't his. Raids were happening less now, in X1, but there was always the risk of a new crackdown. Government intervention waxed and waned. 

The roommate, he was the wiry type that had the East X kind of attitude, without the balls to live there. He dealt, he bought the clothes. He tapped into the media outlet so he'd know what to buy next. More or less, the room was just a place to store his shit and crash before runs. 

The guns were left alone. His money was well hidden. His couch was never slept on. No one ever came to the apartment. Mordeth got the impression that sleeping with a gun was enough to ward off the kid pulling any bullshit. 

Seemed like Devon had gotten into a fight. By the looks of him, probably lost it. 

Another tooth on the sink. An incisor. 

How did you lose molars in a fight? Why would his tufts of hair make it back to the apartment? Mordeth furrowed his brow. Could have been some self styled dentistry... paired with what? Rage? It was hard to imagine Devon ripping his own hair out in clumps.

He put the last tuft of hair and the incisor in the toilet. Flushed. 

 

It picked up on the third ring. 

"Hello?" Meredith sounded tired. Not the kind of tired you saw in people's eyes when they were cast downward on the street. Some kind of tired that comes with the long plateau of an easy life. 

"Meredith, it's me." 

Silence on the other end. 

"How have you been?" She always avoided saying his name. It reminded her of who brought her into the world. The kind of woman that had raised her before she had gotten snatched up by someone who saw someone who was pretty, young, trusting, and more than that, a conversation piece. Girl born and bred in City X gets picked up by an oligarch. A fairytale. A sort of living proof of one's own virtue. In short, Meredith's husband was a piece of shit. 

"Good. I picked up a new case." 

"Keeping busy then? George and I just got in." 

"How're the kids? Grandkids?" 

She gave a rehearsed sounding report of what the people she made were up to. She was only his half sister. None of them had ever seen Mordeth. He doubted they were aware of his existence in anything but a dim way. 

Talking with her was like sending paper notes down a slightly acidic river. You'd get the paper, and you knew the person down the river sent it, but all it communicated by the time it got to you was proof of the other's existence. 

He made the calls occasionally. Neither person enjoyed them. To stop calling was to deny his roots, and it would let her deny her own. 

Now that she'd spent most of her time rearing children in the sort of gated community that sucked up enough water to provide plumbing for an entire district, they shared no perspective. They had come from the same womb, though, and the blood in her was the blood in him. There was something to be said for it. 

She spoke about renovating the basement. 

"Does George shoot pool or is he putting it down there for you to put the laundry on?" 

That one got her. Only a little. 

"How's things in the city?" 

"Frequency's jamming people worse than ever. Same as it ever was, just worse." 

They'd had talks about Mordeth taking his money and moving somewhere else. The talk inevitably turned to whether he was moral in the face of the law. Meredith hadn't talked to him for a long time while he'd been arms dealing. After trying to justify the period before the block wars got government support, she couldn't do anything but condemn true criminal behavior. Not after George had gotten into her. Private Investigator sounded like a retirement job to her. She'd started taking the calls without feigning interest. 

"People have to make money somehow. I've got to go." 

Conversation, sometimes it terminated. She wouldn't say anything that went against the government that George rubbed elbows with and occasionally practiced law for. Not while he was reclined, feet away. 

He let her go and went to get ready. 

"I'll be in touch." 

"Take care of youself." 

 

Center City was the kind of dimly lit store that stocked canned food beside knock off clothing items. There was no question it was called Center Shitty by its customers. The family had moved into the city and opened up half a dozen in X1 alone. 

They were from out of the country. It was a real rarity to have people immigrate into City X. There were a few second generation immigrants around. Most of them reached or approached Mordeth's age. 

The Patels's had enough money to invest in jacking up the prices for the poor and trapped. The downside was, that the family was trapped right alongside their customers. Eugene had said that the patriarch stayed in the main store and handled some of the clerical business himself. 

The woman running the register had stains on her shirt and looked like she hadn't showered for about threee days. Her mouth was agape. She was recieving a particularly long ad. Mordeth waited. 

After another thirty seconds he rapped on the counter. This was more to display his frustration than to get her attention. 

Fifteen more seconds went by. 

She snapped back and wiped her lip off with the back of her hand. 

"I need to speak with Mr. Patel, is he in?" 

The cashier looked at him as if the words didn't quite compute. He was on the verge of repeating his question when she pointed to a door on the back wall. 

"Thank you." 

She was already spaced again, but there was no ad behind her eyes. 

As Mordeth approached the door, it opened. 

"Mr. Patel, my name is Mordeth Endark."

He stuck out his hand to Patel. Patel took it with some reservation. 

"What can I do for you?" His voice was heavily accented. 

"I've been hired to look into recent disappearances. Do you have any information that might lead to the location of your daughter?" 

"What are your credentials, sir?" 

"I'm a private investigator, I've been issued a license by the state." It wouldn't mean anything to him, he didn't know how difficult it was to get. You had to know the right people. In certain circles, his reputation preceded him. 

"What do you know about my daughter?" 

"I know she was running with the wrong crowd. Everyone lost contact. No answers, no motive. If you can give me some names, I can cross examine, see if I can't pick up on something the police hadn't." 

The hope in Patel hadn't really died yet, but he was exhausted with the line of questioning. 

"You have no relationship with the police?" 

"No, I'm independent." 

Patel sighed and looked past Mordeth. 

"I do not know who she was with." 

"Would your son have any idea?" 

"No, no. Sai does not make trouble." 

 

History of prostitution. There were a number of pimps in the city. 

He'd known Maurice from another investigation. Low grade pimp, he'd had his day and had fallen off into addiction enough that the quality of his game didn't matter- he couldn't manage anymore. Maybe he'd be able to tell who Patel's daughter was running with, maybe some other disappearances where someone could tell what had actually happened. If it was private, there'd be no slick black vans pulling up. Yet stories would've gotten around if it had been some kind of hostage situation. 

Mordeth crossed the street. The rain was coming down steadily now. The climate had taken a hit and been over-corrected. 

These days, Maurice operated outside. It was easier to get in touch with his caliber of clientele anyway. He had a dry corner he and his, now few, females stayed at all night. There was no doubt he was squatting in a crumbling apartment building during the days. 

The rain kept the streets quiet. It had to be roughly one in the morning. He walked past the staring eyes of the people who spent their nights standing and sitting on asphalt. 

Maurice was sitting on a crate beneath an overhang that jutted into an alley. During different times it had been built to sell food on the sidewalk, until the man who ran the business got stabbed. 

Before he could get to Maurice, the woman he'd seen with the finger below her scarf, approached him. 

"Lookin' for a good time tonight, handsome?" She ran her palm down the sleeve of his jacket. Her teeth were brown where they existed at all. She seemed not to recognize them from their previous encounter. 

"I'm looking for Maurice." She backed off and her expressiom grew tense. She looked at Maurice, who nodded. 

Maurice was silent. He sat on a crate, a shirt tied around his head. The hoodies he had on were layered and dirty. 

Last time Mordeth had seen Maurice, his upper lip was beginning to creep into a cleft. The corners of his mouth had stretched downward and developed slits that had gone into his jawline. At the time, he was trying to face his situation with some sort of dignity. Now, whatever was under that shirt had left him mute. As Mordeth approached, Maurice made a series of hissing and clicking noises to drive home the point. 

"Anika Patel was a hot ticket item. Who'd she work with?" 

Maurice pointed toward the woman with the neck finger and motioned her over. He was wearing gloves. It was relatively warm. 

She had returned to her slightly suggestive demeanor when she stepped to Mordeth's side. 

"Anika was with Slate." 

Mordeth turned. 

"Did you know her?" 

"We," she was using the royal We to refer to all prostitutes, "talk." 

Maurice has fixed his stare on Mordeth. Something beneath the thigh portion of his sweatpants moved. 'You see how I am now, and I need money.' 

"Slate's is in the slums, I don't know where it is. I'll pay for her time if she leads me." 

Maurice nodded. Whatever his mouth had turned into made a wet sound. 

Mordeth dug into his breast pocket and produced an appropriately small but not offensive amount of money. It was an amount designed to make Maurice feel mildly lucky to have been needed, but not enough to make him try to find and knock over Mordeth if things got desperate. 

"I can bring you there, honey, and do anything else you gonna need." 

Angling for more money. Typical.


	3. Chapter 3

"I saw you recently." The woman with the finger under her scarf and he walked through the rainy- really just misting- streets. The drops were visible in the yellow haze of the streetlights. 

Her face didn't register any recognition of the small event but she broke into a close lipped smile anyway. She saw him as future clientele, or, she was being nice to get more information about how Mordeth knew Maurice. 

"You come down this way?" It was her way of asking if he frequently met with prostitutes. Something else beneath her scarf made a cracking noise. It was not unlike a knuckle popping. The infection had been around long enough that it was starting to become fetishized. It was probably a small part of her customer base who sought her out for her deformities instead of despite them. In X-Main District, there were sure to be high end prostitutes who were slowly turning into something that looked inhuman. Here, it was just a part of the occupation. 

"When I need to. I've known Maurice a long time." 

"Mmm. He don't like talking to people anymore, now he just sit and hold the money." Her eyes traveled downward toward his hand. It was in his pocket. He met her eyes when they pointed toward his face again. "You got a gun or something, right? You ever been to the Undercity?" 

Mordeth took his hand out of his pocket and pushed his jacket back to reveal the handgun tucked into the waistband of his pants. His aim wasn't what it had been. He was still well practiced. It was doubtful she'd be packing. 

"I've been. Haven't been there often enough to know all the right spots." 

The Undercity was a slum that had turned into a place that had electricity and infastructure after the state stopped trying to break it up. It was nestled in a plain after a series of abandoned warehouses at the edge of the district. The wall seperating X1 from East X loomed over it. There had once been a gateway between the two districts. It had been sealed over twenty years before. 

"So what, you liked Anika or something? You gonna, what, find em and shoot em?" She was feeling out how crazy he was. 

"She's a small part of something larger." Mordeth fished his pack out of his pocket and a lighter and lit a cigarette and offered one to her. She accepted. He passed her the lighter. 

They had reached the point where apartment buildings had given way to industry. When Mordeth was a child, warehouses like these were fully operated by machines. 

She was looking at him expectantly. 

"I'm investigating private organ harvesting. Not like the hospital, or the black vans. It's something different." 

Her smile was sardonic. 

"At one in the morning? You out here at one in the morning investigatin'," she said it like the words were the punchline to a joke, "Organ Harvesting?" 

This situation was too familiar. There had started to be a disconnection between who he was and what people saw as soon as the gray had started turning white. The tremors didn't help. He made eye contact with her and pushed out the bottoms of his dentures. 

"Mmmm, you something else. So what, you used to be a cop?" 

"No. Or else I'd be enjoying a pension up North. I get paid for this." 

"To get prostitutes?" 

"You're a point of contact. Young woman are vanishing into thin air-" 

"They could be movin, ODin, hidin..." 

"I'm following up on a tip I was given." 

Mordeth needed her to like him enough to actually bring him to Slate's. 

"So how is it you know Maurice?" 

"Back when I met him, he was augmenting his girls. A rival had an interrupter that was making their augmentations fry out, started burning guys while they were inside." 

"Augmented what?" 

She was younger. 

"Black market cybernetic surgery hadn't died out yet, industry workers still could do the trick. Rib up your pussy, make it move, add suction-" 

"They pussy was hacked. Hacked in the pussy." There was stark disbelief in her face. 

"Augmentation used to be big." Mordeth stopped and turned his head. Behind his ear there were two ports, he pulled his ear forward to show them to her. USB XIV. "When they had the right machines, it made you merge consciousnesses." 

She actually reached out and touched it. His skin was starting to grow in past the edges and fall into the port. It was still visible. The barcode tattoo under the port didn't look like much anymore. 

"Ever see one of those before?" 

"Uh uh." 

"Wait while I piss." 

She was there when he came back. 

They were on the hill overlooking the slum. 

"Why are you with Maurice? Isn't it better down here?" 

"People is starting to get a little funny down there. You'll see it." 

Admittedly, it had been a while.

The houses on the outskirts were true shanties, barely holding themselves up. The bundled people beneath the tarps cast out wary looks as they sat on the ground. 

As they moved inward, there was cooking, the sound of the news or media outlet hooked to speaker systems, music, people standing in front of the houses, which increasingly had cement block foundations, pulled from the crumbling warehouses on the hill, or taken after they fell off the wall that seperared the districts. 

The last thing he'd eaten was a PB & J sandwich. The meet cooking on a grill over some cement blocks was probably dogmeat. There were rumors of cannibalism in the Undercity. He did not smell pork. 

They passed what Mordeth took to be a sleeping man until it was obvious that flies had collected around his mouth and nose. 

They were halfway in before he noticed it for the first time. A man had half of his face chewed off. From the inside. On one forearm, most of the skin was missing. He wiggled his fingers as they went by and you could see the tendons playing against the exposed muscle. 

He made eye contact with the woman rather than Mordeth. She steeled herself. 

"I don't like it. Uh uh." 

Mordeth could bet that some people were starting to like it. He passed a woman who had gouged out her eye. The hole was brown. 

They weren't dying of infection. There wasn't the stink of a wound beginning to get gangrenous. 

What he had taken to be a makeshift tattoo parlor was actually a woman sewing a patch of skin back onto a man's shoulder. He groaned with pleasure. Her bottom lip was bitten off, and her teeth were exposed. When she turned her head there was a section of hair, probably yanked out, that had been pulled strategically, as to not disrupt her look. 

This was the wrong place and time to start asking questions. 

Soon they were in front of Slate's. It was mostly a cinderblock foundation and had electric lighting and a ceiling of plywood underneatu tarp. When you looked behind the first part of the building, it went off into many rooms, all built similarly. It was somewhat impressive. 

"I can get back myself. You can go." 

She seemed unsure. 

"Hope you find what you need in there." She was eager to leave. 

Mordeth stepped into Slate's. 

He emerged with his pockets a little lighter. The story on Anika Patel was that she was in a strange mood, yet something unlike being frequency jammed, and up and left Slate's one night. No one ever heard or saw from her since. 

It was a long walk back to his apartment. The rain had let up almost completely. The activity in the Undercity had died down. 

Whatever his roommate had, perhaps another variety of virus, infection, whatever you wanted to call it, these people had too. They were for all intents and purposes, functional. 

Asking Maurice's woman or any of the Slate's girls would whittle down their faith that he was out in the world to get things done. They didn't know who he had been. If he didn't carry a gun, he doubted they would've told him anything at all. After the jacket was off they could see his tattoos, but they'd bled and warped into indescernible shapes, most of them. He'd been proud of them at one point, had thought that they'd given him some kind of distinction. If not because of their quality, it was the quantity. Now the only thing they really indicated was an impulsiveness in the past. 

The woman he'd purchased had let him sleep for a few minutes. He rubbed his eyes and started to walk. 

He was almost out of the slums by the time he was approached by a man dresses in dingy white cottons. They looked home made. On the backs of his hands were painted eyes. He was infected, recently too, it was only showing in how his ear appeared to be split double, a copy growing out of the back of itself to give a layered effect. There was an extra finger growing out of the palm of his hand. His eyes were bright, there was something broken in there though, like this get up was supposed to save him, like one day if he smiled hard enough and passed out enough pamphlets he'd be happy again. 

"Prophets of Hope, if you want in, mail on the address. We'll take you, we'll take anyone that wants a way out." It sounded rehearsed. 

On the front of it, the same eye on his hands, which Mordeth now noticed had a double pupil. 

"A way out of what?" He said it flatly. Cults like this always had the same schtick. 

"A way out of this--" He tapped his temple with a forefinger. "--and this," he gestured toward the slums and the city. 

"What are you offering?" 

"Are you ready to take a leap of faith? Is anything you have here better than what could be?" 

"I don't know what you're talking about." 

"Think about it. If you need something different, if you need a family, write the dropbox. Someone will find you." 

Secretive. 

If all the Prophets of Hope had to offer was dingy cotton clothes and the ability to pass out pamplets, no one would join. 

"I'll keep it in mind." He pushed the pamplet into his pocket. 

The wet was starting to make him cold.


	4. Chapter 4

He's standing in the dark apartment. The light is on in the bathroom and through the half open door it's blinding, hot, white light. Mordeth can barely look at it. There is the sound of an infant crying. He crosses the apartment. He is naked. There is a slight chill. He opens the door fully tp his bathroom and the entire thing is a stark white. The baby is in the sink and it is still and it is gray blue. He is compelled forward. He reaches out a hand and touches the stillborn and the crying stops and the lights continue to brighten. The mirror over the vanity does not show his reflection. He is still touching the stillborn when his fingers begin to slide through her flesh. Black blood seeps through the holes his fingers are making. He cannot pull out his hand. It's sliding deeper into the stillborn. He grips the vanity and tries to remove his arm. He keeps trying to catch himself in the mirror and nothing is there. He's up to his elbow in the girl, who is beginning to deflate inward around his arm. The hand that's hanging onto the lip of the vanity for support begins to lose its grip. He is up to his shoulder- 

Mordeth opens his eyes and he's on the couch. On the news, the anchors feet are swinging in front of the camera. Flies buzz over the brown liquid on the news desk. In the background, a man spins himself in an office chair. He goes to stand and finds that he can't. Panic sets in. From the bathroom, the cries of an infant. He has to get up. 

Mordeth started awake. He had slept in his bed. He wiped his eyes and pulled himself to a sitting position. Since his visit down to the slums he couldn't shake the feeling of cold out of his body. 

He sat on the edge of his bed with his palms pressed against his eyes for a while before standing. There had been a lot of work to do recently. He fished two acetaminophen pills out of a bottle and swallowed them dry. He walked stiffly. 

The bathroom light was on. It was morning. His eye caught the sink and for a moment he was back in his dream with the infant crying and his eyes widenened until it processed that it was just a large piece of skin, part of a tattoo. He slid it up the side of the sink with a finger and then pinched it between his thumb and forefinger and dropped it into the toilet and flushed. There had been flesh on the inside of it. There was very little blood where it had been. 

He'd pissed while sleeping again. He changed. The trashcan lived under the sink now. He caught himself in the mirror and turned away to go see if Devon was home. 

He leaned against the doorway of the dark room. The alarm was off and the time was flickering incorrectly, even despite the fact that most people used estimations these days anyway. 

His hand found the light switch on the wall. 

"What the fuck-" Devon rolled over in his bed. Light sleeper, only sometimes. 

"What's with the skin? I had to clean up your teeth and hair too. Get up." 

Devon blinked against the light. His bed was a mattress on the floor. The room was a cavern of dirty clothes and trash. He was wearing a hat to sleep and Mordeth got the picture. 

"I went to the slums yesterday and saw a lot of people who were missing skin. You're missing skin. Tell me what's happening." 

Devon had sat on the edge of his bed. 

"I got home like fucking 45 minutes ago. Can we do this later?" 

"I can't haul out your body if you die in here and don't want to flush more of you." 

"It's fine, I've had it for a while, fuck, just chill." He pulled down his longer black sock and revealed a perfect rectangle of skinless area on his lower shin. "That's my spot. Listen, things are fucked up, I don't really-" 

"It's a sex thing, right? Like the deformities?" 

"It's a drug thing. Like you get a bad batch and pain starts getting you high and you're not bleeding much, and people are picking themselves apart thing. Like a fucking shouldn't you know this type of shit thing." 

He'd taken a glance at the papers on the coffee table, type thing. Mordeth raised his eyebrows in mild surprise. 

"That's a new one. Does it kill you?" 

"If you let it." 

They sat in silence for a moment. 

"Why are you yanking out your hair if you have a spot?" 

"You're looking at disappearances, right?

Mordeth narrowed his eyes. 

"Word gets around." Devon shrugged. 

Whatever the word was couldn't possibly be good. He was getting tired of leaning against the door jab. He sneezed. 

"I'm working on something right now. Did you know Anika Patel?" 

"She's fucking old news, Mordeth. My fucking girl took a walk and never came back, is the deal. I fucking lost it when I came down and realized she'd actually taken off in fucking UpCity of all things." 

It was a section of East X that was known primarily for gunfire. 

"What's her name?"

"Debra Gallagher." 

"Get up and come tell me what happened." Mordeth pushed himself off the door jam. He crossed the living room and sat into the couch with a sigh. Too much walking. East X was starting to become an unavoidable way of continuing. 

Devon stayed standing. He crossed his arms. Mordeth looked at the missing incisor and became dimly aware of the fact that his dentures were still in a glass on the floor next to his bed. 

"We're at the spot where we're at, and she's fucking, acting all weird, sitting straight up, not moving, and then that goes on for like two hours, doesn't wanna get high, which I'm like, cool, but like, whoa that's fucking strange, and I'm like well she must be having a fucked up night, and she just gets up and says she's got something to do, and I'm high and don't really care and I think she's cheating on me, with this other guy, and he picked her up, but in the morning, he's at where I'm at, and he says he hasn't even seen her. I say it's all good she's a bitch anyway, and he's still like, nah I was with this other girl." 

Mordeth took that all in. 

"You don't jam to frequencies? She doesn't?" 

"She used to but it stopped working. This wasn't that. She was like, fucked up." 

"Is she always with you?" 

Devon made a face. 

"She's been around for a while. We didn't start hooking up till like a month ago or something. That was my girl though, yknow? Nice and easy. No problems." 

"You come here though. So who's she with when you're here?" 

"Fuck if I know. We all hang out with each other." 

It sounded like a possible control frequency. 

"Do you recognize this?" Mordeth picked up the pamphlet from the coffee table that was stenciled with the words Prophets of Hope. 

"You see those dorks in the nicer spots. Why?" 

He leaned back into the couch and turned that one over. 

"Can you keep that under control?" Mordeth mimed tugging at his hair. 

"If I get what I need and I'm feeling fine I'm fine. So many people have it and it doesn't show. It's o-fucking-kay." Devon said it quickly like he didn't really want to think about it too deeply. 

"How are you getting in?" 

"There's people that'll bring you." 

This was the most they'd ever talked. Mordeth had known someone who could smuggle you to East X without a transport visa but he had fallen out of contact when going to deal with cases in East X became more trouble than it was worth. 

"Give me their information." 

"You're fucking nuts. They're not gonna bring you there. You gotta, yeah, they're not just gonna let you roll up and say you want in." 

Mordeth leveled a stare. 

"Vouch for me." 

"And say what, like, here's my fucking, great uncle, he's here to like, fucking, get shot?" 

"Say I wanna go out with a bang." 

"I get you in, and you're gonna like what, like, start looking for fucking footprints?" 

"I know people in East X. I knew how to get into East X. My contact isn't in the game." 

"I know you have a lot of fucking money I haven't touched. Your guns are in the ceiling in," he pointed, "that fucking closet. If I haul your ass in there I want it to be worth my while." 

"Where's the money?" 

"I have no fucking clue, I just saw you grabbing ammo once." 

Mordeth made an offer. 

"You're paying for me to get in." 

A perfect rectangle beneath his sock that he was probably cramming a pen or something into at regular intervals. Still, his contacts in East X hadn't heard from in a long time. It might be a little easier- 

"I'll pay." 

Devon uncrossed his arms. 

"You gotta give me like, fucking, a little time before I go back in that shit. Like eat and sleep and shit, time."


	5. Chapter 5

"They sealed it on us a day ago. We brought a crew down and it was walled off. Who knew they even gave enough of a shit, yknow?" The head of the traffickers was sitting in a worn office chair behind a desk. They were by the wall seperating X1 from East X. A guide was listening intently while gripping his laser guided rifle. 

Mordeth was packing a 9mm and a semi automatic shotgun. Devon had a 9mm. He'd insisted on installing an attachment for a scope for some reason. 

"How many times have you used the new route?" 

"You're gonna be customer 3." 

"Any casualities?" 

"Just one. It's alright though, I think he was drunk or something." 

Devon made eye contact with Mordeth. He'd started worrying what had used to be a pimple behind his ear. It looked more like an absess or a sore now. 

"You'll equip us well to bring us through? We need night vision." 

"Night vision huh?" The leader chuckled. "If you can find fucking night vision, You can start operating one of these yourself. We got flashlights, go right up here." He tapped his pectoral. 

"How direct's the route?" 

Devon had already taken the money. He was caught in between wanting to save his own skin and wanting to get high, back in East X. Ultimately he'd take the risk. He was chewing on the inside of his lip. The fingers had come away from the sore behind his ear looking rusted red, despite not being very wet. 

"As direct as you're gonna fucking get, you said you've done this before, you know you gotta go to the main interchange, then circle back. Any more questions or are you gonna stop wasting my time and pony up the money?" 

"How did the casualty happen?" 

The leader was growing red in the face, now. 

"The fucking mutants, man, fuck. Sewers swarming with them. Where the fuck did you think they went when they stopped sitting in the alleys?" 

Mordeth kept his face impassive. He should've figured it out sooner. He dragged his cigarette a last time and bent over the leader's desk to stub it out and produced some money from his pocket. 

They discussed prices. When the tender had been passed, the man gripping the rifle perked up. 

"I'll be taking you down." He said it with a little too much zeal. Probably a little younger than Devon. 

Mordeth looked at him warily and then looked at the leader again. 

"Ah, he's fine. He's got good head. Rex knows these sewers as good as anyone else I got." 

There was no one else in the room. 

Rex had a crossbow strapped to his back. 

Mordeth gripped Devon's shoulder and turned them both away from the leader. 

"I'll take my money back if you can't handle it." 

Devon played with that idea while he looked down at the scope he'd insisted on having mounted on his handgun. 

"It's like what, fucking, an hour? Two hours?" He'd spent enough time dodging bullets in East X to have a little heart. 

 

They descended down the ladder of the manhole. 

"Smells like straight shit," Devon's powers of observation were astounding. He went to put his shirt up over his nose and only touched the rim of the body armor. 

Rex tapped the sensor on his chest. It was clearly cannibalized from something else, partially. 

"This thing beeps too much and let me handle it, if you fire your gun, we're all toast." He seemed excited. He reached into a pocket in his kevlar and produced a map with a red line drawn through the sewer. It had been stenciled from something else, and was marked with X's and circles indicating hazards. 

He pointed to the ceiling. "You gotta watch out for these guys they got climbing up here. They'll spray you with uh, acid." He wiggled his fingers in front of his face to mime the skin melting off of someone's skull. "They've only got like six feet of range though so just watch for the blue lights." 

Mother of God. 

Devon swallowed thickly. 

They flipped on the flashlights which produced a bright light roughly ten feet outward. 

From deep within the sewer, over the sound of running water, there was the sound of something chattering. 

They had come down into the sewer on a landing that slowly became a ledge against the wall. There was the stench of corrosive shit. The black water, maybe brownish if you held it in a glass into the light, was roughly seven inches deep. 

Rex took out his crossbow and whistled. Devon rode middle. Mordeth took up the rear. 

If something attacked in a gas plume, they'd have to depend on Rex, who was now making open mouthed beat noises to the same tune he'd been whistling. 

They'd been walking through the increasingly sludgey water for three minutes when Rex pointed "See 'im?" at the ceiling of the sewer and fired his gun. The thing dropped into the water. 

They were going to round a corner when they heard the sloshing sounds. The sensor on Rex beeped regularly when Mordeth tuned to it and he gripped the shotun in his hands and leveled it. 

The thing was too disjointed to be very quick. Its face was half submerged in the water at intervals, and the noise it made sounded like a sharp inhalation raking against an esophogus that didn't allow for the air intake without a lot of fleshy resistance. On one side, a leg had reversed it's joint direction to that of a canine's back leg, except for the fact rhar it was elongated like a cricket's. The leg on the other side was a relatively unaltered human leg. It dragged itself forward on one short forelimb. What had once been a human face was overtaken by a mass of eyes and a jaw that moved limply as it pulled itself forward. 

It screamed when the light from their flashlight hit it. And hauled itself forward. 

Another drone sped down the ceiling, seeking heat, and first sprayed the mutant before Rex fired up at it with his rifle before leveling it at the mutant, who was now thrashing as its skin melted. Rex fired into the mutant's head and the exit wound blew out the back of its skull. The thing's legs stopped thrashing and stiffened as it rolled onto its side in pain. 

"They're all nervous system now, sometimes hittin em in the head just makes em do this." Rex tapped the place where his skull met the back of his neck. "You wanna make sure there's nothing behind you, get em right here." 

He pulled out a pistol and fired a round into the base of the mutant's neck. 

All the eyes were falling from what remained of its head, kept from falling into the sludge by bundles of nerves. 

Devon squeezed himself against the ledge on the wall to avoid getting too close to the thing as Devon passed. 

They encountered another of the acid spraying things before Mordeth started to hear noises behind him. He looked repeatedly, turning back, and there was nothing in the glare of the flashlight. 

Maybe his imagination. 

"What do you keep fucking looking back there for?" Devon was chewing his lip. In the corner of his mouth there was blood. He spat a pink piece of his mouth into the water. 

"Sounds like there's something there." 

The sensor on Rex started to speed up just as something fast moved in the water in the long, dark stretch of tunnel ahead of them. They all backed up while keeping their guns trained ahead. Devon tripped and fell on his ass and scrambled to his feet again, pulling his gun out of the water. 

Bringing him had been a mistake. He handled his gun poorly. He had just used it to land on. 

"We got one," the beeping on Rex had slowed down after they'd moved back and the splashes from the thing grew closer. 

There were sloshing sounds, now closer, behind Mordeth. He whipped around just in time for Rex to start firing his weapon at something too fast to aim at. The thing screamed out in a parody of a woman's voice as it was hit, and backed off. It gripped the walls with hands that had fingers that had spread outward into discs at the tips. The face opened up vertically and there were teeth surrounding an eye nestled right above the opening of the throat. The thing's tongue hung downward and it salivated long strands freely. It was only caught on the wall for a moment, and dodged Mordeth's blast before jumping onto Rex who fired his rifle right through its stomach. The thing had Rex's face in that vertical mouth that opened up the entire head, and Rex screamed. Devon screamed and fired rounds that actually hit the mutant in the torso. It continued to bite down on Rex's head as he thrashed and dropped his gun. Finally Rex's legs gabe out and both he and the thing dropped into the sludge where Mordeth was able to dispatch a shot into the thing's head. 

In the ensuing silence, they both breathed heavily. The sludge had thinned now and was moving gently over their boots. Rex's flashlight flickered and died beneath the water. He started forward and went to grab the sensor that was still angled out of the water, because of how Rex's body leaned against the ledge. 

Devon had bitten the skin off the back of his wrist. It floated in the water before sinking while Mordeth held the sensor in his trembling hand. 

Devon's face was a mask of fear. His eyes had widened. Mordeth turned over Rex's body and pulled the sopping map from his pocket. 

They were close to the main interchange if the turn they had just taken was the one he was looking at. 

"We gotta get the fuck out of here. We gotta get the fuck. Out. Of. Here. We're gonna fucking die." 

Something dragged itself through the water and opened a mouth that was pointed forward like a reptile's, yet extended deep into its torso. Mordeth used one hand to grip his map against the barrell of the shotgun and fired. The thing got enough of the shot at that far away to scream and Devon wheeled around and fired half a clip at the thing. Three shots hit before it fell, thrashing into the water. 

"First manhole that opens to East X, we're taking." The exit plan was to open into a part of the district that didn't see much gunfire. 

Devon put his pistol in his waistband and picked Rex's gun out of the water. His hands were going too. Before they started moving again, Mordeth unclipped the crossbow and bolts from Rex's back. 

They shot another of the drone things before it started to spray. The sloshing noises behind them kept a distance but were still audible. They passed a rotting body, bloated and stinking in the water. Maggots crawled through a face that was pale sickly white and a mouth that was stuck open and hardened. Devon gagged. Mordeth had to blink a few times. 

Uninterrupted, they stepped into the interchange. It was a large, deep room with a series of tunnels leading off of it, some of them pouring sewage into grates. 

The sensor beeped rapidly. Noise came from a tube near the ceiling.

"Don't shoot, we'll blow." Mordeth hung his shotgun to the side and grabbed his crossbow.

At once four clawed hands gripped the lip, and it pulled itself forward. The thing was all one mass, a head that had spawned copies like tumors with eyes, and a tongue that jutted into the empty space before hanging down eight feet below where the tube stopped. Out of the sides of the tongue jagged outshoots of bone rose from where they had been pressed into the sides and outward. 

It jumped and freefalled out of the tube and hit the shallow water below with a wet slap. Devon and Mordeth were sprayed with sewage. The thing was righting itself when Mordeth shot a bolt into the mass of its body. It sunk into the flesh and the mutant didn't even make a noise. The lethal tongue had curled out of the water now and was drifting and flicking forward through the air. 

The crossbow loaded and shot one bolt at a time. A sheen of sweat had broken out on his forehead. In slow motion, Devon was screaming something and scrambling behind Mordeth and pointing toward a tube just large enough to fit them, Mordeth winced in pain as he turned and the thing's tongue was beginning to snap forward and Mordeth was trying to run, the tube was 6 feet away now, Devon's legs were disappearing inside and Mordeth's knee buckled just as the thing's tongue started to drift toward his legs, its maw opened and inside was the full torso of a man, his face caught in a grin through the strands of ropey saliva he gripped the tube and pulled himself in and the thing's tongue was around his ankle now, the spines digging into his skin and- 

Four crossbow rounds hit the thing in one of the tumorous heads and it reared to the side and released its grip on Mordeth's leg and turned its attention, a bolt flew into the torso in its mouth. The thing started to flail then. There was the sound of a crossbow being reset and Morderh fumbled with Rex's. 

The thing had recovered slightly and had stood on its four limbs and was lumbering forward to some place outside of the field of view the tube gave him and there was the sound of more splashing, more bolts firing, finally a scream of pain from a man- 

Mordeth lifted his pantleg. Just above his ankle, the spines had left wounds roughly the diameter of a woman's finger, two, and they were bleeding steadily. 

He slid himself out of the tube, the thing was in its death throws now. He put his hands on his knees and scanned the room for somewhere to sit as Devon made his way out of the tube. There were tears in his eyes. He'd torn an ear clean off. 

The man who stepped out behind the still moving corpse of the mutant was the leader of the trafficking service. A sword was buried in the mouth of the mutant. 

Mordeth stared across the Interchange at the trafficker. 

"You followed us." In the background, the rapid pulse of the sensor. He wanted to find somewhere to sit and light up. 

"It's not far." 

Devon's breathing was fast and ragged.


	6. Chapter 6

East X - 45 Years Ago 

Large portions of the younger City X population have relocated to East X in order to partake in a culture of violence, drugs, consciousness manipulation and the last wave of body augmentation. 

A severe drought has taken hold of the district and its occupants cannot leave under threat of death. Purification techs who were once working for the state have been strategically kidnapped and held hostage by two warring factions comprised of former gangs and groups from East X. Resevoirs have become battlegrounds where they are still filled. In the streets, people who have remained neutral or are not useful to either cause are beginning to thirst to the point of seizures and death. The rare rainwater that is collected without being purified is acidic to the point of enamel breakdown. 

Fatal Horizon and Shortwave have absorbed the smaller crews in the city. 

The drought has lasted two years, the fighting began a year and a half ago. Management under the two banners have accumulated enough prestige to have rations of water, ammunition and food smuggled in. The state has been absent except to enforce the containment. 

The reclusive leader of Fatal Horizon, Tito, is known to stay linked to the neo consciousness internet, known colloquially as the Stream. His mind is protected by technicians from possible psychologically warping attcks through Stream link-up. 

Shortwave is already growing weaker in light of Fatal Horizon's more technologically empowered front. 

This event will come to be known as the East X Blockwars. 

 

A splinter of Fatal Horizon ransacks a Shortwave stronghold. Its dark and dingy aside from the glare from several monitors. Guns and their parts lay strewn. One of the monitors has been shot and blinks and flickers at inconsistent intervals. The bodies of the few that were securing the area are still warm and bleeding. 

Chapped lips have become the norm. A man stands up with a half full gallon of water gripped in his hand, pulled from a hiding place beneath one of the tables. 

He uncaps it and sniffs. 

"It's fucking rainwater again." 

"How's it smell? Bad?" 

He sniffs it again. 

"Nah, if it was bad they wouldn't have kept it, right? They're not getting like streetpeople, right?" The man holding the gallon, B, takes a sip and slides his tongue over the roof of his mouth. "Yeah, it's got the taste, it's fine though." 

The truth was that no one could tell them just how bad it was. Rations of water were divvied up by a hand of Tito's, still, they took whatever opportunity they could to drink. Even if the water was on the questionable side. 

"You picking up on something?" This time from another man who gripped a lazer pistol in his hand. The barrell was almost comically wide and dense. He said it to a fellow who was staring off into middle space, his eyes ringed green, recieving messages from a neural pathway. The one with the neural augmentation is the de-facto leader- he is the only one that can recieve commands when they are in the field. 

In the corner of the room they are in, a recliener that is dented from so many people sitting in it, is covered in burns from cigarettes. 

A man with arm augmentation prods at an area where the screen embedded in his skin meets the metal affixing it to his actual flesh. Three screws he can't replace have been missing. During seiges like these, he is on the look out, but knows that the screws are either rare or custom. One by one they are beginning to strip, just as the leader with the neural pathway confides in his close friends that he is beginning to recieve information more slowly after an operating system update that was coded by someone on the black market. 

The State is beginning to pull away the tech. The augmented, they're getting nervy. 

By the time Mordeth gets the jug, it tastes like the spit of the others. He drinks it and wipes at chapped lips with the back of his hand. 

He was the last one to cross into the room, and in close quarters, can't do much looting. His friend, C, is the same way. They joined late. They do not enjoy the same respect or comraderie. In the end, Mordeth is handed the jug instead of C because he's able to contribute more in battles. 

His augmentation came just before the drought, designed to get a low datarate of information fed directly into his brain. At one time, he enjoyed the idea of using his involvements in smuggling in order to afford the types of augmentation that allowed people to bend the reality around them consciously, allowed people to enter the stream as some digitized version of their consciousness, allowed for perception that would change one's outlook on the reality around them forever. Instead, the drought came. Of his crew, most of them had been split up by the time Fatal Horizon had decided who was useful. Having no particular skill, he was asked to shoot. 

C is looking grim. He keeps working the inside of his mouth in order to try to harness more of his saliva. It's a vain attempt at combating thirst. 

Mordeth notices this and looks away. They've known each other since before the drought. There is a pang of guilt, like he should've split some of the spitty, unpurified water. No bond is as strong as the feeling of thirst. 

Still, he'd been handed the jug. 

C catches his eyes. 

"It's good man, I saved some back at base, I don't want that shit anyway." 

It's not a very convincing lie. C is his friend. 

The scavengers, the augmented, the ones who are starting to frantically look for replacements for their hardware by unscrewing monitors, they're at work. It could be an hour or more before they comb through everything. 

He touches the ports he hasn't used in over a year. They're behind his ear. Seeing them scramble, even while scraping together salvage to trade for new augmentations, caught in the grip of something that doesn't make sense even to them, it makes the future seem dimmer. He'd grown up with new tech coming out daily, the newest augmentations onscreen, the new hardware, the capabilities of the operating systems. Now that it was their time, his time, to finally go out and get what was promised to them from , a new life merged with technology, it was getting ripped away. The desire to augment remained. 

Mordeth is staring at the door. His hair is brown, it's growing out from a haircut that someone else gave him a month ago. Like everyone else he's lanky from thirst and bad food. He's started in on his tattoo collection, the only visible ones are the latin around his left wrist, the block of binary code by his port and a cybernetic rendition of God's hand touching Adam's on his outer forearm. 

The dead man on the stoop has bionic eyes and trails of nervous system rerouting embedded in his skin, thick black silicone lines that sit flush and travel up his neck and around his almost shaved head. 

He's slumped forward. 

Staring at the man, somehow, is like staring into the future- an alternative future, something that will never be. Somehow, it's like staring at himself. Mordeth has drifted outside onto the stoop. 

More and more, Shortwave has been abandoning their strongholds. When they get the ping that the signals from their augmented have fallen offline, they aren't following up by sending out their men. 

Mordeth's staring deep into the face of the dead Shortwave with the bionic eyes. He was older, verging on old. A lot of the Shortwave guys seemed to be the older ones. Fatal Horizon was young, and maybe, that's why they were winning. They'd seen a lot of death, and yet, with the net being how it was, violent imagery and experiences for kicks, none of it felt new. 

It was the lack of feeling that was starting to get to him. He impressed upon himself the faces of the dead sometimes, to try to recall them, to try to feel more human. When he couldn't sleep, only sometimes, he'd think of them and try to put together who they were even though it didn't matter anymore. C always looked quick and looked away.

"Hey M, come look at this." It's from C. 

In his hand he has a cube with squares of different color on every face. It moves. 

"What is it?" 

Mordeth and C are going through the motions. When their eyes meet, all that is behind either ones stare is the ever-present thirst. On Mordeth's part, the interactions are a forced but necessary distraction. Smiling would crack your lips, now. When C shrugs, M is supposed to smile. Instead, he catches another glance at the dead Shortwave and goes to sit in the cigarette burned recliner. 

When you're thirsty, your blood thickens. When you're thirsty, you start seeing black spots in your vision. C sits crosslegged on a milk crate and rests his head on his knees. 

The ones who fainted in the field would be brought back if their friend was strong enough. 

Mordeth isn't feeling very strong. 

It was hard to know if anyone else from their original crew was still among the living. They'd been stealing and smuggling over tech to scrap for parts from the richer districts. Those times were a long ways away, when they could look forward to counting their money and maybe a friendly fire-over-their-heads shoot out with a rival gang. It hadn't felt fun then, it had felt like scraping forward to survive, but they had't been thirsty, and they had laughed. C had been a jokester. What remained of his once light personality was overshadowed by the rumor that they had all been called here for a genocide. 

Mordeth feels it. C feels it. The Stream had made East X sound like the place to go to get augmented on the cheap, to make money hand over fist, to become anything else but yourself. He had come here looking for action outside the yellowing walls of the dingy apartment his father had left his mother alone in. 

"You alright?" 

C lifts his head from his lap. The gun is still clasped in his hand. 

"Yeah man, I just wanna get outta here." Translation: the only water I have is back at base. 

It's a split level apartment, the house they're in. Maybe a family had lived here once. 

The scavengers rifle. 

______

 

They're shooting at a stronghold that has been confirmed to hold a water tech. Behind a blown out, burned car, he's firing shots toward a window frame that is issuing lazer fire. The hooded man keeps peaking out an instant before he fires a shot, a split second where one eye, roughly 1/8 of a skull, is visible. The lazer fire is going toward where someone has a dissolution gun mounted on a tripod behind a cement barrier. 

Mordeth trains his sights on the window. C is crouched behind another cement barrier closer to the stronghold. 

The stronghold once had a balcony on the first level, it had once been a squat apartment building of six floors, and now that balcony had collapsed and Shortwaves were firing crouched on either side of the sliding glass door hole- the glass itself was long gone. 

He always picked one and issued shots at odd intervals to not attract too much attention. 

The Shortwave peaks through the window again and fires toward where he knows the Dissolution gun is located because he saw his comrade get liquified, and sees the body, where what is left of it is almost flush with the cracked pavement. More puddle than man.

A neon sign advertising a brothel flickers pink and blue against the night sky. The lazer fire is red. 

His heart is hammering and in slow motion the Shortwave peaks out from behind the framework of the window and by then Mordeth, maybe running off of pure instinct, squeezes the trigger of his pistol before the man's head appears, and by the time it does, the bullet finds it. 

He doesn't like to go inside when someone he knows he killed is in there. They don't need another body anyway, not after the killing part is done. 

C is starting to brace himself against objects when he stands, and sometimes mid stride while walking, he stops and hangs his head like he's trying to keep from seeing double. Triple. 

Last Night: 

Mordeth puts a cup of water by where C is sleeping on a couch and wakes him up and points. C gulps it down. It's unpurified. C smiles but there is less and less light behind his eyes. He's squeezing off fewer and fewer shots in battle. He's dragging his feet. 

C's starting to talk about years ago, about being home, things about his family that no one wants to hear or listen to, except Mordeth listens and he hates it because it makes him think about his own family: his sister- half sister- long gone disappeared into some suburb, his mother, him being young and sitting down on a rug in front of a screen while his father smokes and talks about what the drop off point is on private comms, and how his mother turned into a ghost, drifting from room to room but not really engaging anymore, and after a while he tells C to shut up, and C is taken aback, and goes okay, and for a little while, he keeps quiet about wanting to go home to die instead of being here. 

Now: 

C is leaning against the concrete barrier and his eyes are closed. Mordeth has chosen the gaping hole that was once a door to a balcony to aim at. He thinks maybe C kicked it quietly instead of going into seizures or getting shot but instead he sees C stir and then haphazardly let off a few rounds in the general direction of the house. 

______

It's been quieter and quieter in the basement of the apartment building they're all in right now. There used to be actual conversations, arguments, vain attempts to get neural interfaces back online for some stimulation, but now they're all alone in their own worlds, sometimes staring into the bright light of the screen while one of them either plays with a game or watches media. It's the kins of entertainment their parents or grandparents would've found engaging. For them it's a chore. 

They're sort of awaiting orders and sort of resting. They've got enough water for a day and a half if they drink it right. 

Mordeth isn't sure if C has a weak constitution or if mentally, internally, he's given up. He's stopped talking about home or much of anything else, really. 

The basement smells like unwashed body. When they eat, swallowing is hard, they can't wash anything down their dry throats. 

C isn't really eating like he's supposed to. 

They're supposed to be glad, they're winning, they're finding the Shortwaves less eager to fight. 

He's not sure if C is just dozing or if he might still be awake or if he's sleeping. 

He reaches out and touches him and C opens his eyes and looks at him and doesn't say anything, and Mordeth can't figure out what to say either. 

___

"It's almost over." 

This is after running in a seige on some Shortwaves and inside, they're all dead. 

They stayed outside, no reason to go in to see bodies. Tito had been organizing the water pretty good then, and C was drinking and they had food and ammo, and things were going better. It was like the sun had risen again but no one was there anymore to greet it. 

C had stopped leaning over and looking like maybe he was going to go in his sleep but he mostly stood there usually somewhere close, like in Mordeth's eyeline. 

C held his gun like a forgotten toy in a child's hand. He nods, he knows it's almost over, but really, what is over? Because it will always be some struggle, and after this, after this stark introduction to adulthood and the reality of death, it would never be laughing and sharing money again. It would never be showing friends planned augmentations. 

The battle would never really end. They both knew it. A line had been crossed in the sand and maybe the line had been crossed far before they were both born, and they'd been unaware of it, and now things were starting to creak and moan under their own weight. 

Mordeth said it like it would cheer C up, like it would make him smile, like it would make the attention come back into his increasingly vacant expression. Mordeth said it like he wasn't starting to suspect that Tito was in bed with the State, like he wasn't starting to feel like a hamster on a wheel. 

_____ 

They had all called each other by letters in those days. When C came to Mordeth's mind, years later, he would always wonder why he never asked his real name.


	7. Chapter 7

The safehouse was more of a room, fairly close to where they had been let out of the sewers. 

Devon had been close to a fit of hysterics when they'd arrived. The look in his eyes had gotten better as the story had worn on. 

They had sat in silence for a long time, neither one really capable of sleeping, neither one really capable of leaving, until Mordeth started to talk about what had happened in East X. At first it was supposed to be an explanation, a kind of backstory, to build credibility, to make Devon understand what East X had always been for, instead it turned into the story of a friend that had shrugged off his mortal coil in light of the world's problems. 

"So what, it just ended? He got you all water and the other guys all died?" 

"It went back to normal. People got water, the stores opened." 

Devon wasn't quick enough to pick up on the fact that it had been the State. To tell him that would reveal that his current condition, it was manufactured, a way to cull the herd without drawing public outcry and riots. 

He was laying in a steel frame bed against the wall, like he had been since he got himself into it maybe three hours before.

Devon had been sitting with his back against the wall. Now he was laying on his back too, contemplating the same cracked ceiling. The bathroom light was on and cut through the dark some. 

Mordeth sighed. His body hurt. Trudging through the water had been worse than walking the streets. 

He watched Devon for picking and pulling and saw only a pill and a half fished out of a sandwich baggie shortly after they'd gotten to the safehouse. 

"What about your buddy, C? Is he dragging his ass around investigating?" 

"He shot himself right as Fatal Horizon was starting to break up." 

Mordeth got himself into a sitting position. The effort made his eyes feel heavy. His mind was turning, though, memories of the Blockwars, the mutations, Debra Gallagher and Anika Patel, Prophets of Hope, this new condition his charge had, his charge himself, whether or not he could stick around and be back up during this excursion- He braced his hands on his knees and got up and several things clicked and settled into place as he did and he reached for the backpack he'd asked Devon to carry and went to the bathroom. 

The lack of a fan had never gotten to him until now. He'd been putting he shower off. The smell of sewage still whafted off of him. He turned on the shower and got undressed, and finding there was no trashcan, he opened the basement window and slid something out and to the side, out into the night and the rain. 

A thin bar of soap had been attached by time to the tray in the shower. Reaching hurt. He let the water hit his lower legs, not bothering to lather them. 

He had taken Devon for a little tougher than he was. The drug addict aspect, it was an indication of some kind of street savvy, some kind of experience. There was still a good chance Devon would leave and join his crew again, which would abbreviate Mordeth's stay in East X. Without someone to watch his back, he didn't want to go through the rougher parts of the city to see what was turning young girls into cattle. He got out of the shower and lowered himself onto the toilet. He wanted to be watching the news and thinking about his papers. He pulled on the fresh shirt he'd bought and a fresh pair of pants and something else he was not fully ready to name or make a part of his day to day reality, but was nonetheless there, a reminder that soon he'd be doing a lot of watching the news, shuffling papers, and remembering the things that had happened all this time, because more and more, there wasn't anyone else that could remember them. 

When he opened the bathroom door and the light fell on Devon, he was sleeping.

Mordeth got into bed. Sleep did not come easily. 

____

A few hours later, Devon slunk out of the room. It was not surprising. Mordeth had paid him a finder's fee for hooking him up with the transport, and he needed to go get high. 

Alone in the safehouse, the story still hung in the air. 

In the streets, with his pistol sticking out if the waistband of his pants and his body armor on, he felt exposed. 

____

An East X strip club in midday is like a Pit Bull whose teeth have been filed to nubs. Few patrons spoke in hushed tones. 

Mordeth found himself in a familiar scene, hunched over unwanted liquor, sitting across the table from someone who was vaguely powerful in his own sphere, without the benefit of a name known outside his very specific circles. 

This time, his name was Donovan. Years ago, he'd had a different handle. Mordeth was known by some older heads in East X due to his involvement in the Blockwars and subsequent gun running, so Donovan had given him the time of day on a cut and dry disapperance case where the woman who he'd been asked to find was under Donovan's tutelage. Mordeth didn't disrupt the business or cause any trouble, and neither had the family of the "missing" woman. 

Perserving connections is important. 

"Have any girls wander off recently?" 

The niceties hadn't taken very long. 

"What, you're gonna find 'em for me, you're showing up to do some pro bono work for ol' Donovan?" He said the name with a look in his eye like Mordeth shouldn't slip and say the wrong name, even around the sparse lunchtime patronage. 

"It's something bigger." 

Danger came with showing his hand to everyone who asked. If he could look into someone, things like that, they go both ways. 

Donovan leaned back. 

"Had a kinda jumpy girl leave Monday, just up and got out, she seemed liable to leave anyway, why anyone like that wants to leave and try ta make it on their own is fucking-" He twirled his index finger around his temple, "-beyond me." 

"Had she been behaving strangely? Blank expression?" 

Donovan narrowed his eyes. 

"I dunno, wasn't there. Girl wouldn't even look me in the fucking eyes, always acted like she was ready to crawl outta her skin. You get it, she's new, still thinks she can go home to her family and be a kid again. You see this shit all the time." 

"What's her name?" 

Donovan provided a first name and said he didn't know the last. He didn't want to show his whole hand either. 

"How about in the last few months, any other walk offs?" 

"You gotta tell me what's going on before I sit here and spill my fucking guts, get it? I don't need any fucking trouble from you." 

Clearly Donovan was feeling nice. The hands could provoke light maternal instincts even in men. 

Mordeth brought his voice to a whisper less to make sure he wasn't overheard and more to punctuate what he was going to say, to give it the air of mystery and seriousness it deserved. 

"Organ harvesting. Girls getting up and leaving their set ups. They never come back." 

"You don't think I'm playing that fucking game, right? This is primo fucking stock I got going away."

"No. It's a frequency." 

Donovan raised his eyebrows. Mild surprise, maybe a bit of interest mixed in there too. He rubbed his chin. 

"'Bout a month and a half ago, my girl, the one that's running the show, keeping all the chicks in line, she goes out on a call, monthly thing, repeat customer, type of guy I've talked to 'cause he's up north and dropping so much fucking dough cause he loves her, and she never comes home. I think she fucking ran off with the creep till he calls and says she never showed up. No one's fuckin seen her." 

If he asked if she'd been behaving oddly, Donovan would say he hadn't even been around. 

It was a Debra Gallagher situation. Maybe an Anika Patel situation. At this point, the names or the faces didn't even matter. 

"When'd you start seeing these Prophets of Hope?" 

"Call it, what, fuckin two months? Three?" Donovan moved his hand through the air to indicate that his experience of time wasn't that of a man who worked for a living. 

"I've been seeing them in X1. They've got a bit too much of a precense for some little outfit to smooth over some asshole's insecurity." 

Get it, Donovan? I'm out here from X1. Do I look like trouble, or is this something I'm doing to pass the time while I still can? 

"You're startin to see characters of a little fucking prestige wear the clothes, and you know it ain't a fashion statement since that shit's all preprogrammed anyway. Guy who runs the games over on R Block, pittin the fucking muties against each other, he's startin to rep the fuckin eye and everything." 

Go find one of the bozos for yourself, I'm not comfortable saying more, you did me a favor, I respect where you've been, but really you're getting a little too inquisitive for my tastes and you're not exactly a fun guy, neither. 

Mordeth nodded. He asked a general location of the games. 

Donovan gave him his codeword and blessing. 

Mordeth left. 

He blinked in the daylight. This was one of the nicer parts of East X, and there was still some midday bustle. His body armor wasn't completely out of place. The rain had let up and a heat had crept in, he could smell the water evaporating off of the street and sidewalk. He stretched and felt for the gun in his waistband. There was either far off gunfire at the edge of his hearing or he was imagining it. 

He passed stores. Here, people were less jammed on the frequencies and more consumerism tripping. A screen mounted on a building, high up, had dead pixels where gunfire had hit it. 

His leg still hurt, despite having watched the wounds stitch themselves back together. He was surprised the kit even worked, past its expiration date. It was the sort of thing that was unpurchasable. 

____ 

He's sitting on a bench like the kind they haven't had for years, and he's in his bodyarmor, and he sees Devon wave him into an alley. Mordeth gets up and crosses the street, and he sees a static car that looks fake, digital, until he keeps his eyes on it as he moves across the street, and it's some kind of cardboard cut out. The driver waves and smiles and Mordeth finds himself waving back. He reaches up and touches the ports behind his ear and finds something wet there, something that comes apart and sticks in his hand, and in his hand it's black and spongey lile mold, and he presses a thumb into it, and it writhes away and makes a screech so he drops it onto the ground. Devon is way ahead now, and still waving him on, and he enters the mouth of the alley and it's raining now and dark except for the orange glow of a street light, the rain angled in the sky by wind. 

He's barefoot now, and his body armor is gone, and he's in six inches of water like it's in the sewer. The feeling of danger comes across him and he goes to find his gun and that's gone too, and he's walking forward in the alley and squinting into the distance where Devon's figure is far off now. 

He passes a dumpster and the face of a young boy turns and smiles up at him. He hasn't seen a child in years and he stares, and the boy's got a ball peen hammer in his hand and there is a dog next to him, in a curiously dry spot while the sewage is beginning to creep to waist level on Mordeth, and the boy is beating the brains out of a dead dog with the hammer, the middle of the dog's head is depressed, the eyes are jelly, falling out of the sockets, and the boy turns away from Mordeth and keeps beating, and all Mordeth can think is did he kill the dog or did he find it dead? 

____

R Block wasn't as bad as it got for East X. Still, he wished he could conceal his shotgun underneath his jacket without attracting too much attention. He was still tired after the treck through the sewers. The backpack, even without the bottle that Devon had stashed inside it, felt cumbersome. He elected to leave it. 

The rain had started again. Another moonless night. 

Taking the alleys would make it harder to see, easier to he overtaken by someone waiting for him in the shadows. He tugged his gun out of his waistband and pressed it into his jacket pocket as he walked. People walked down the streets in packs, giving him a little more attention than he was hoping to attract. He grunted in response or didn't say anything when someone felt the need to say how out of place he was walking down the street, late into the night, in a district he should've left behind years ago. 

He turned a corner and saw a mugging in progress, less of a mugging and more of a group stomping a mudhole in a man whose friends had taken off into the night. He retreated, pressing himself against a wall until the wet breaking sounds disappeared and there were the sounds of footsteps going in the same direction as the dead man's crew. 

Mordeth collected himself and turned the corner and the dead man was taking in airy, wet breaths through a shattered ribcage and punctured lungs, and really, he wanted to take his gun out and end the life of the man who had been reduced to something broken and heaving in the streets, a dark stain of piss on the front of his pants. Instead, Mordeth passed, now brutally aware of his surroundings. 

When he saw people in the distance, he held tightly onto his gun and crossed the street or went another way toward the same direction, depending on whether they seemed to be dangerous or not. The louder, more excited ones, they were the ones that were entertained by their own company. The ones with music, they were safe. It was the ones who had the quiet stalking feature of a full and bored predator, those were the ones to be avoided. 

As he got closer to R Block the sound of rapid gunfire began to reach his ears. The screens affixed to the buildings were playing music now, the standard East X fare, something to get the blood pumping and to make one begin to feel dangerous, notorious, capable of running an empire of their own if only they squeezed the trigger enough and always, always looked right. 

The poor youth had started to get corralled into East X even before Mordeth had been drawn here. Give them a whole district, and if they live, they can go to X1 to finish off whatever rancid life they have left in them. 

The streets, the memories, they came back to him, scenes without much context or meaning. 

He walked down the rusted metal stairs to a heavy basement door. A heavily armed man stood outside. Mordeth offered his key into the building. 

The door swung open into a giant room with high ceilings, like the first floor had been knocked away balconies ran around the outer edge, where more well dressed patrons leaned on rails. On the outside, it looked like a very securely boarded, derelict apartment building. 

It was packed with people. In their hands, they gripped money where they fed a bar and fed bookies. Drugs were done openly. There was none of the mutation that you were starting to see, none of the mutilation that was still relatively new to Mordeth, only the steady pulsing beat and the newest fashion- baggy was back in. He took his gun out of his jacket pocket and tucked it in his waistband again. 

This type of scene was familiar to him. he attracted some second glances and a double take followed by a wink, which he returned. 

The cage was roughly fifteen by fifteen feet. The bars were heavy, welded, and covered for the first ten feet by chicken wire in case some moron decided it was a good idea to start sticking a limb in there to impress his friends with his bravery. 

His eyes had to adjust to the dark before he noticed a few in attendence who were dressed in all white. 

As the time went on, the crowd was beginning to get rowdy, with the cage empty. 

He turned his head to see a bouncer that was looking at him, and Mordeth went to the bar and ordered a drink, neat, and held it in his hand. He found a bookie with people ready to bet in orbit and produced a small sum of money. The bookie said something and he did not hear it. 

The first two in the cages were relatively small and still kept their human forms. The one Mordeth bet on walked on four limbs and had a section of spine jutting out of its back skinlessly. More or less a tail. It- she- had breasts with large blinking, slightless eyes where the nipples had been. Her head had taken on a canine quality, with a snout, and there was a mouthful of sharp teeth that she could not close. Strands of saliva dripped from her muzzle, alongside a tongue that spilled out of a gap in between her teeth. What had once been her hands were large bony hooks that had seen blood, there was the flaky copper tone to them that indicated she had been in the cage before. Her legs had a canine quality to them, terminating to a point smaller than a human foot, which gripped the dirt in the cage with claws all the way around it. She weighed roughly three hundred and fifty pounds, and although her ribs were visible, she was all sinew and lean muscle. 

The other mutant stood straight like a man but had a single, large black eye on his head and no nose, or ears, or other discernible features aside from a mouth. He twitched and jerked. At his sides there were large claws, not unlike a bears, and it wasn't long before he climbed the side of the cage. 

The first thing, the former woman, stood on her hind legs and snapped gingerly at her target, who had crawled out of reach and seemed determined to stay there. She tried to get at him with the bony deposits of hooks, and she moved slowly, slower than the male mutant who sped upwards another couple of feet until he was hanging on the top of the cage. 

The crowd was getting rowdy in a bad way now, and Mordeth felt for his knife which he had in a sheath, tucked into a pocket of his body armor. 

Something flew through the air and gripped the skin of the more skittish mutant and he was shocked and lost his grip and fell to the dirt in the cage. It took the woman thing just as long to turn as it did for him to regain his senses and get up, and she swiped at him, but quickly, he backed up. Soon he was climbing the cage again. 

The things in the sewer had been ravenous, maybe due to hunger, maybe due to insanity. These ones which had been captured and held in captivity were more managable, and less ready for a fight. 

Mordeth took his attention of the woman thing trying in vain to climb the cage and scanned the room. 

More white outfits had appeared as the fight went on. 

He caught one talking to a female, and kept them in his line of vision until the Prophets of Hope man put a hand on her back and they cut through the crowd. Mordeth waited a few seconds before going in their general direction, cutting through the crowd at a slower pace because there was less of him, and then they disappeared into a set of double doors. Mordeth posted up, pretending to pay attention to the fight, where the male mutant had been shocked to the dirt a second time and this time had taken a little too long to get his bearings and had taken a slow an deliberate swipe from the woman mutant which had jabbed a hole in his stomach from which he was now bleeding, though probably not enough to kill him. 

The bouncer at the set of double doors was a real bruiser. 

He caught Mordeth's eye and nodded his chin to the fight. 

A Prophets of Hope man walked by and handed him a business card and touched his shoulder. Mordeth slid the card into his pocket. 

The male thing was bleeding from another bony hook to the leg and had learned to stop climbing the cage after repeated electric shocks. 

When another Prophets of Hope foot soldier passed, Mordeth caught his attention. 

"Who are you guys?" He indicated the white outfit. 

"Out of district for the night, huh?" The guy had a strange, airy, warm look in his eye. 

"Is it fashion? What's the eye?" 

"My friend gave you a card, write the address!" He read the man's lips over the pulse of the music. 

They were watching him. Mordeth let the man drift away. 

The male mutant was clearly dying now, and the woman thing had managed to take a bite out of its leg, and now it was trying to climb the cage, lightheaded from blood loss. 

His bet had been correct. 

What was inside? It had seemed like tearing insanity in the sewers. Now, their humanity showed through. The male thing was aware of the crowd, you could see it by the way the head turned toward the sound of some particularly loud crowd noise in the beginning. 

Mordeth swatted at his neck. He had not seen any insects. Whem he took his hand away to look at it, there was blood on his fingers. 

A woman who matched the description of Anika Patel looked at him from the balcony, he had felt her stare. She was dressed in all white. 

The male thing was screaming as it was torn into by the disjointed mouth if the woman mutant and the screams seemed to be far off. 

It was time to excuse himself. He collected his winnings from the bookie. 

He made eye contact with two Prophets of Hope characters, one of which gave him a wave. He stepped into the rain, the plastic cup with the drink still in his hand. 

"Have a nice night." The bouncer urged him away from the door. 

Mordeth had been there for roughly an hour. Without a point of contact, he'd seen enough. 

He tugged his gun from his waistband and put it back into his jacket pocket, and started to walk. He hoped that the rain would keep the streets clear, while knowing that the rain had never stopped him when it had been his time to tear through the streets of East X. 

On a building, a woman ran her hand down the front of a man, her hard body was tanned and fit and naked, and Mordeth lit a cigarette. 

He rounded a corner, still close to the games. 

Devon was trying to get fronted something. The sound of his voice was one of geeked up desperation, underneath a laughing exterior, one that was trying to convince the dealer that hey man, I'm cool, remember me from forty minutes ago, I had money then, I'll have money again, type thing. 

He paused. Having another body with him would settle his nerves. 

He felt the breast pocket of his jacket. The money the client had given him was going quickly, and only some pieces were beginning to fit. 

He walked back to the safehouse. Devon was more trouble than he was worth. 

The sting on his neck ached. 

He'd figured that no one knew him anymore, that because of how he looked now, he could pass through like a ghost, some kind of odd, harmless spectre. 

There was an errand he had to run. He dug into the bite on his neck. Probably, the thing was already diffused into his bloodstream. They could head straight back to his safehouse and snatch him in his light, disrupted sleep, if they wanted. 

Was the man who could take care of it even still alive? Had he been replaced? Mordeth dug into his neck, either mashing the solid inward or hopelessly worrying the small wound. 

He made the walk back to the basement apartment with the heavy door. 

He sat on the bed and stared. Had that been Anika Patel? 

He turned the business card over in his trembling hands. He was past the point of writing a letter, and would only get some canned response, or they would set him up. 

An hour after he got there, a defeated Devon returned for his bottle. 

"You were on R Block tonight. Did get into the games?" 

The room was chilly. He kept the light off aside from the bathroom light, which leaked into a strip on the wall between them. 

"What're you like, fucking following me?" The actual anger in Devon's voice wasn't there. 

"Saw you after you burnt through all the money. I don't think Anika Patel is dead." 

Devon was breaking the seal on the bottle. 

"Alright? What's that gotta do with me, or like..." He was drinking from it now. Devon had the out of focus look your eyes get when you've been drinking. He finished his sentence: "Debbie." 

"Are you gonna spread everything I say to you to your friends?" 

Devon made a sound that was only similar to a laugh. 

"I'm not sure any of 'em would give a shit, or that I really give a shit." 

Bad mood. Rough evening out. The knit cap must've looked out of place in the warm weather. 

Maybe tomorrow.


	8. Chapter 8

Levi had been the father, and in Jake's face, Levi lived. The son had taken over the father's modest shop of black market weapons. It had changed locations many times over the years. For the last ten, it had been this place, dark, with low ceilings, and concealed arms. Mordeth had seen the son a handful of times as he grew. He visited less for the sake of business (he organized his own weapons and the shop offered neither good prices nor anything rare) and more to see Levi, who had been called L in the Blockwars. Levi had been like the rest of them, at the time. Over the years he had turned into somewhat of a hybrid criminal and family man. Mordeth suspected protection from one of theirs who had ascended to a higher rung of the criminal ladder- someone who had just been a letter and nothing else, a missed connection. Levi had developed a louder, more brash personality as time went on. It could've been a business technique in order to make his shop more memorable and his clientele more loyal. 

Whatever had ultimately gotten Levi hadn't gotten his business. The shop looked essentially the same, aside from the absence of an armed guard, who had always been scanning through the media outlet while he was on duty anyway. 

They spoke about how the illness, though having had taken on new symptoms, was from the same infected wound that had been seeping since before Mordeth's parents were born. 

"Private frequencies, that's how they're doing it. They got these guys on leashes, and the leash only goes as far as the frequency." 

"What kind of outfits can afford it?" 

"No one that operates out of East X, lemme tell ya. This is up North shit, this is inter-city type of shit." 

Mordeth's hand was touching the wound on his neck, unconsciously, and when he pulled it away he could see Jake staring at it, not the pinprick wound, but the hand, and there was that look in his eyes that Mordeth had started to grow used to maybe a year ago or so, and he looked straight through that stare because really, from the place that stare created, nothing good could come, so the only thing there was to do was move past it, move to where they had been, after brief period of awknowledgement in eye contact. 

"Do you do any dealing with the Prophets of Hope?"

For all the talk of organ harvesting and disappeared women, he hadn't brought up the cult until then. The look on Jake's face changed. Like with Donovan, there was the sense of information that wouldn't be able to be accessed. 

Jake's face cleared to an expression that was more welcoming. He was absently playing with a gun, cleaning it while not looking at what he was doing. 

"I've never heard of them using or purchasing guns. Not the main guys anyway, I know they're starting to show up at the games. I wouldn't do business with them anyway, Dad wasn't into the idealogical shit." 

The wound, the potential GPS device lodged in his body, it hurt to the touch. He had worried it in the night, dimly remembering the sore Devon had created on his neck, and hadn't been able to feel anything solidly lodged just beneath the skin. If it was there at all, it was traveling through his liver and kidneys.

He considered telling Jake about it, then reconsidered. The kind of technology required to transdermally lodge a GPS device in someone's body was long gone. Until he started to see white clad cultists following him in the streets, there was no way to confirm that it hadn't been some strange, rare insect. 

"I'm looking into Prophets of Hope, I need a contact." Brass tax.

The kid issued a full bellied sigh and put the gun down. 

"Have you seen Jonsey yet?" 

"I don't intend to." Jonsey was a last resort. He still pulled strings in East X, despite his reputation. Some bonds don't break easily, and some things aren't as revolting as they once were. 

Jake looked like he was going to say something, going to recommend he go get Jonsey's vile blessing, going to recommend that he pay someone else to do the footwork for him while he stayed holed up somewhere nice, looked like he was going to make a whole litany of recommendations that would come from a place of not wanting to take responsibility for whatever would happen when Mordeth continued his investigation. 

He pushed off the counter and pushed his hands in his jacket pockets and leveled his stare at Jake who grew uncomfortable, who broke eye contact, who seemed like he still wanted to look for Dad to tell him what to do in this situation he hadn't been taught about, the kind of situation that comes along that you have no context for, no prior experience allowing seamless navigation. 

"There's a guy down on UpStreet, he was in Prophets of Hope and got out, been talking to anyone that listens about them. He's fucked up in the head though, and no one's listening, and no one's shooting either. I'm not even sure if he was really with em or if he's just some bored frequency jammer who needs a little attention." 

"How do you know him?" 

"He used to run for a bigger crew before he lost his fucking gourd."

It was worth checking out, even if Jake had given him the name easily despite his disinclination. 

UpStreet was active, the kind of place where the gunfire wasn't in the distance and the streets only featured pedestrians running in packs. Day or night, he'd be watched from windows, maybe bothered by someone who wanted to know why he was there. The supposedly crazy guy being from UpStreet seemed to fit the story, disenfranchised youth joins cult to find meaning in life beyond squeezing a trigger, getting his dick wet or powders. 

Jake passing along that particular piece of information directly after trying to get him to seek Jonsey's aid knocked around in Mordeth's head. Donovan had also grown uncomfortable when Prophets of Hope were mentioned. 

It was possible that his criminal contacts were either being paid off, or knew better than to dig into the new organization. There had to have been some display of strength beyond converting those higher in the criminal hierarchy. An entire district of enterprises avoiding a new upstart. Hoping against hope that they would be left alone, that whatever business Prophets of Hope was doing didn't concern them.

"I'm gonna need a transfer pass to Northside. Do you still do those?" 

Jake's expression cleared. 

"Yeah, machine's back here." 

Some technology hadn't been ripped away completely, only cannibalized, Frankensteined into something new. 

______

Devon had found something to do with himself during the night after sleeping on the floor. Mordeth had figured Devon for a drug dealer. He wasn't wrong, but Devon was too small-time for the effects he could afford, not to be supplementing his income with prostitution. Either way, Devon had money and wouldn't be barking up the wrong tree asking. 

He had gone out to get supplies this morning and Devon had been on his way out too. Supplies of his own. Mordeth was beginning to get an inkling of why Devon bothered with him at all, why he wanted to sleep in a small room with him, why he wanted to live in X1 with him, and he'd seen it before, back in the apartment, in their small interactions before finding the molars on the floor, the look in the kid's eyes that would be there for a moment before he started to talk about the woman he'd been with or some other irrelevant fact about the carbon copy life he lived, the same look that would be tucked away sometimes when they passed each other wordlessly, ignoring each other, both too tired to bother even pretending to conversate. 

Keeping someone seedy in the apartment was about plausible deniability. If something emerged, Mordeth was not surprised. It had happened before, in the confines of his quiet squalor. In the end, they went away, and would be replaced.

_______

The room was sparsely furnished and something in Reese's eyes said that he was glad for the attention. The cigarette in his hand was replaced immediately by another as soon as the first went out. 

His hygiene was substandard. In the corner of his eyes, crumbs had collected, despite Reese touching his face every ten to fifteen seconds. 

Mordeth sat back in the wooden chair across the card table to get away from the smell of unwashed human. 

The dingy apartment was dark, the windows covered, and where light shone through the cracks in the coverage, it was tinted yellow by dirty window panes.

"So, you know, it's like, we all get there, and they're talking to us about how we can be saved, how we can find a new life in each other, how everyone's all the fucking same, we're just all stuck seperate, and the idea is we're supposses to be connecting, seeing inside each other, seeing inside the whole world." The ash on his cigarette would go unflicked for a long enough time that Mordeth began to become mildly distracted- caught up in the suspense of whether he would flick it, or whether his violent hand motions would make it fall. 

"You did drugs. Were you already hooked on them?" 

Reese made a face like he wasn't sure if what had lead to his following the trail of drugs to a cult was addiction. 

"When we were there it was like, when we got them, it was for something, it was always for somethin', like you're changing your consciousness to fit some mold that's gonna tell you how our own experiences keep us all separate-" 

He rattled it off like it was something he'd heard time and time again. 

"Okay, start from the beginning. Why did you join?" Mordeth kept the pace of his voice slower in order to encourage Reese to collect his thoughts more before he spoke. It had been some time since the former Prophets of Hope member had slept. 

"I had just gotten fucking thrown out of my old job, the one before last was decent but they fucking, the guy was a prick. So I'm out of a fucking job and I start talking to this girl, and she's already in, so I follow her in, and next thing I know she's gone and I'm still there. Now these houses they've got are pretty nice, you go in, people don't work, you're more or less doing what you wanna do, this is at first, before they start trying to get into your fucking frequency, into your brain, and what they're doing is they're trying to break apart pieces of you, they're making you theirs, you go in and you think it's normal, that it's just people meditating and they're doing these ceremonies and then you're in the white clothes, and then they're telling you that names are a seperation of the self from the reality of what you are, and you're already in there, you're already tuned in to whatever they're jamming over the frequency they're pumping, so you're feeling glad and ready to fucking do it, and I started noticing, it's a fucking revolving door, you see girls here then they're at another house and they're on the street, the one I came in with went away and at this point I can't fucking re-MEM-ber, basic shit, basic shit about who I am or what's going on, I wake up every fucking day and I go and do what they're telling me, and something's fucking wrong-" 

Reese was breathing heavily now and a foam of white had collected in one of the corners of his mouth. His eye contact was too intense, too close. His hands gestured. The current cigarette's ash had fallen to the floor. 

"-so I fucking try to go, I try to say fuck it, grab my shit and leave, they're making it so I can't, they notice I got my shit and they talk me down and whatever station they're putting out calms me out, I'm good, I'm gonna take a fucking nap, they way what do you need and I say to get the fuck out of here and they give me whatever I want, drugs, and next time I try, I'm trying to remember the name of something I'm fucking looking at and I try to go again this time no stuff, acting like I'm going outside, and I wander back to the fucking place, I maybe get a mile and a half away and I'm looping back. They fucking sat me down and brought me down to this fucking basement and told me are you gonna stay the fuck put and do what we tell you to fucking do and there's all the guys down there, all at fucking once-" 

Reese's voice had grown high and shrill. 

"They already had these fucking orgies, got us all up and there were fucking women but some of em kept going when the women weren't even fucking there, and it's like, I try this again next time they're gonna fucking kill me, so I'm trying to get what I can off em for the fucking ceremony work, to try to get my frequency to tune the fuck out, so I know one day I can leave and make it, they're not giving me enough food and I'm getting skinny and tired and I'm still fucking in that house, and then I can't do anything and I'm fucking forgetting who I even am anymore, like what's my name and how do I leave is all I think about, they've got you pretty tuned out there and I know I gotta get out every time I see that fucking door open and air comes inside, one day I'm in the fucking basement and I'm there for a long fucking time, standing, I don't know if I was put down there or if I just went down there and I see there's some fucking paint thinner, for what they've got paint thinner for I don't know but like I said the house is pretty fucking nice to make you to want to stay so I uncap it and I start going, and one day I start fucking noticing that I'm not feeling all calm, like I'm sweating and need to get the fuck out, it's not bottom down low feeling, so I wait on it and I fucking leave and I think they know I'm just gonna come back so they're waiting on it to kill me, when I come back, but I never fucking did. I walked the fuck right out of there." 

Reese was sweating. He wiped at his mouth with the hand that had the dead cigarette in it and tried a drag and then lit another. 

Mordeth sat back and took that in for a while. 

After a moment he asked: "What about the leader?" 

"That's the fucking thing, no fucking leader. You don't hear about a fucking leader, you don't see or worship a leader, it's all people who have been there longer talking about how fucked up their lives were and now they're here and they're better now, you do things and no one knows where the fuck it's coming from, there's other houses and higher up people live there and fucking, none of it makes any fucking sense but then you're balls deep and don't even get your own fucking name." 

Control frequencies to dampen emotions- to bring members back when they wandered. That kind of technology would be pricey and hard to keep under cover. Houses nice enough to make the people of East X feel attracted to living in them despite the fact that they would be expected to go along with a belief system and a restrictive way of life.


End file.
